Anyone know of a random data generator?

[Kevin D. Clark]

"Dan Coutu" <coutu at snowy-owl.com> writes:

> cat /dev/random | tar cf /dev/st1 -

Your problem is that tar expects the arguments after the
tarfile/tape-device (/dev/st1 in your case) to be *file and directory
names* and not random gobbledygook and/or "-" (whichever you
intended).

How about this instead?

   cat </dev/random >/dev/st1


Another thing:  generating random numbers is time consuming, and
relying on /dev/random directly doesn't produce a lot of output very
quickly.  I think you'd be better off with something like this:

   perl -e 'print rand while(1);' >/dev/st1

(For those that are curious, the guts of Perl take care of calling
 srand() for you in this situation)


Regards,

--kevin
-- 
The generation of random numbers is so
important that it cannot be left to chance.